Today is the day that I discovered screen/window grabbing. I thought it is something that would be very useful, and will help not only with this blog for my 30 day experiment, but also help me with the other aspects of my blog here, and on the Connect Forums. I do an awful lot of screen/window/dialog-box grabbing.

I have heard a lot about Skitch, so first of all I thought I would give that a try.

I downloaded the free version for about 6.8 Mb zipped. When you run it you get asked if you want to :-

Move it to the Applications folder

Run it at startup

You have to login to your Skitch account, or you can create a free account. You can skip that though. This is where my problems then seemed to expand out of control. Try as I might, I couldn’t get anything to skitch though. I tried creating a new account, entering all the details, but nothing happened. I tried not entering the details, but then all the skitch options were greyed out, so I couldn’t grab a window/screen/dialog-box etc.

That seems to work a treat at the moment. The install of that does a similar thing to Skitch, it prompts you to move the app to the applications folder, and restart the app. At the moment it doesn’t launch with the Operating System. I did eventually fix that by right clicking on the icon in the dock, once I’d launched little snapper, and choosing :

Keep in Dock

Open at Login

You can also get it to launch at login, from the General, Preferences inside Little Snapper.

With Little Snapper you get two things. Firstly there is a button/option you can click on:

Secondly there is the main window where you can do some simple image manipulation. The images are stored in a folder on the file system, you can see where that is, and modify it in the Advanced tab of the Preferences dialog:

It’s pretty cool for what I want, and similar in a lot of ways to the Sniping Tool in Windows 7. Well, it’s similar enough for me to not get totally bemused and lost by it all !